from the lobbying-by-any-means-possible dept

Hollywood's efforts to win political clout have always stretched across the country, from glitzy campaign fundraisers in Beverly Hills to cocktail parties with power brokers in Washington.

Last year, the film industry staked out another zone of influence: U.S. embassies. Its lobbying arm paid to renovate screening rooms in at least four overseas outposts, hoping the new theaters would help ambassadors and their foreign guests "keep U.S. cultural interests top of mind," according to an internal email.

That was the same year that the Motion Picture Association of America, which represents the six biggest studios, reported it was lobbying the State Department on issues including piracy and online content distribution. Hollywood's interests – including its push for tougher copyright rules in the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade pact – often put the industry at odds with Silicon Valley.

The only public indication of the embassy-theater initiative was a February 2015 press release from American officials in Madrid, titled "U.S. Embassy Launches State-of-the-Art Screening Room." It credited "a generous donation" from the MPAA.

Asked about its gifts to the State Department, the lobby group declined to say how many embassies got donations or how much they were worth.

"Because film is a great ambassador for U.S. culture around the world, MPAA assisted with the upgrade of some embassy theater facilities," said spokeswoman Kate Bedingfield. "All gifts complied with the law as well as with State Department ethics guidelines."

Nicole Thompson, a State Department spokeswoman, said at least three embassies besides Madrid received between $20,000 and $50,000 in entertainment upgrades last year – London, Paris and Rome. The revamped screening rooms, she said, aren't intended to entertain U.S. officials, but rather to help them host screenings to promote an American industry and sow goodwill.

Thompson said the donations were proper and that all gifts to the department are reviewed to avoid even the appearance of a conflict of interest. "The department has explicit authorities to accept gifts made for its benefit or for carrying out any of its functions," she said.

The State Department routinely accepts gifts from outside groups, Thompson said. She couldn't provide any other examples of major gifts from groups that simultaneously lobby the agency. Thompson declined to list the items given by the MPAA or their total value, and wouldn't say whether the group had made similar gifts in the past.

There was at least one precedent. A spokesman for Warner Bros. Entertainment said the studio helped pay for the refurbishment of the screening room at the U.S. ambassador's home in Paris in 2011. "This donation was coordinated with the State Department and complied with all appropriate rules and regulations," the spokesman said.

State Department policies posted online specifically permit gifts from individuals, groups or corporations for "embassy refurbishment, " provided that the donors are vetted to ensure there's no conflict or possible "embarrassment or harm" to the agency. The posted policies include no caps on the value of donations, nor any requirements for public disclosure of foreign or American donors. The rules also say that the donations can't come with a promise or expectation of "any advantage or preference from the U.S. Government."

Obtaining an advantage, albeit a nonspecific one, sounded like the goal when a Sony Pictures Entertainment official wrote to the studio's chief executive officer, Michael Lynton, to relay a request to fund the screening rooms from Chris Dodd, the former U.S. senator who heads the MPAA. The executive writing the note – Keith Weaver – sought to assure the CEO that such a donation wouldn't be improper.

"The rationale being that key Ambassadors will keep U.S. cultural interests top of mind, as they screen American movies for high level officials where they are stationed," reads the message, included in a cache of emails hacked from Sony and which were posted online by the website WikiLeaks.

"The cost implication is estimated to be $165k (aggregate of $$$/in-kind) per embassy/per studio. Apparently, donations of this kind are permissible."

The MPAA has long been a powerful presence in the nation's capital, spending $1.34 million on federal lobbying last year, according to data compiled by the Center for Responsive Politics. One of its flashier tools has been to host exclusive gatherings at its Washington screening room, two blocks from the White House, where lawmakers get to watch blockbuster films, rub elbows with celebrities, and up until several years ago, enjoy dinner – a perk scuttled because of stricter rules on congressional lobbying.

Hollywood studios depend on foreign markets for much of their profit but the MPAA's interests don't always align with those of other major American constituencies. For example, Hollywood studios have moved some film production to Canada to cut costs. American film workers have tried to get the federal government to stop the outsourcing of jobs, but have been met with resistance from the MPAA.

The trade group has also pushed federal officials to pressure foreign governments into adopting stricter copyright laws. An MPAA-funded study found that in 2005 worldwide piracy cost American studios $6.1 billion in revenue. That number has been disputed by digital rights advocates.

For the TPP trade deal, the MPAA has discouraged the American government from exporting "fair use" protections to other countries. In a hacked message from Dodd to the U.S. Trade Representative, the MPAA chief warned that including such provisions, which in American law allow limited use of copyrighted materials without permission, would be "extremely controversial and divisive." Digital rights activists have characterized the efforts as overzealous.

"They're basically encouraging other countries to adopt the most draconian parts of U.S. copyright law and even to reinterpret U.S. copyright law to make it more stringent," said Mitch Stoltz, an attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation. "Broadly speaking broadening copyright law harms free speech in many cases by creating a mechanism for censorship."

The state-of-the-art screening rooms are a relatively minimal investment by Hollywood as it works to strengthen connections abroad.

This spring, the U.S. ambassador to Spain, James Costos, brought a group of foreign officials to Los Angeles for a meeting hosted by the MPAA. Among them were representatives from the Canary Islands, who came prepared to discuss filming opportunities and tax incentives for American studios in the Spanish territory. The State Department touted the trip as an opportunity to "expand bilateral trade and investment, including through ties between the entertainment industries."

It's not known whether the path to that particular meeting was eased by the new screening room in Madrid. At the theater's debut in February, the ambassador's guests were treated to a dark tale of corruption, lobbying and double-dealing in Washington – the Netflix series "House of Cards."

To outside observers focused on Snowden's leaks, the intelligence community's decision to show its hand looked very much like a calculated move designed to shift focus away from the ongoing "unauthorized disclosures" and onto the incautiously triumphant agency. Now, nearly two months down the road, intelligence officials are claiming this leak has been more damaging to its surveillance efforts than all of Snowden's combined.

Since news reports in early August revealed that the United States intercepted messages between Ayman al-Zawahri, who succeeded Osama bin Laden as the head of Al Qaeda, and Nasser al-Wuhayshi, the head of the Yemen-based Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, discussing an imminent terrorist attack, analysts have detected a sharp drop in the terrorists’ use of a major communications channel that the authorities were monitoring. Since August, senior American officials have been scrambling to find new ways to surveil the electronic messages and conversations of Al Qaeda’s leaders and operatives.

“The switches weren’t turned off, but there has been a real decrease in quality” of communications, said one United States official, who like others quoted spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss intelligence programs.

Why the change in heart? Well, when officials first leaked the details, the government asked that certain names involved be withheld. The New York Times complied. McClatchy News, however, did not. When it broke the story, it mentioned two names.

An official who’d been briefed on the matter in Sanaa, the Yemeni capital, told McClatchy that the embassy closings and travel advisory were the result of an intercepted communication between Nasir al-Wuhayshi, the head of the Yemen-based Al Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula, and al Qaida leader Ayman al Zawahiri in which Zawahiri gave “clear orders” to al-Wuhaysi, who was recently named al Qaida’s general manager, to carry out an attack.

The question now becomes: if the leak was so damaging, why did the government leak it? Sure, it told the New York Times that revealing the names would "jeopardize its operations." But it would seem that simply revealing it had listened in on a "conference call" would do the same thing, especially after issuing orders to close down embassies it thought might be affected. (This group of nineteen embassies was reopened after it was determined the plot centered on Yemen.) It wouldn't take the terrorists involved too long to figure out what recent group discussions centered around threats to embassies and, from there, narrow down which forms of communication were used. McClatchy's decision to name names seems incidental to the whole collection process.

When the fingers are pointed by the intelligence community, a great many of them need to be aimed at officials privy to the details. This was originally portrayed as intelligence agencies doing the job they keep claiming they're doing: detecting and reacting to terrorist plots. Two months down the road, the leak/spin attempt is being referred to as "incredibly damaging." It just doesn't add up.

It seems that others are finding the Times story (and officials' claims) unbelievable as well. McClatchy's pushback on the NYT's narrative involves some strongly-worded statements that question the government's credibility and its delayed reaction.

Asher, in a statement, said that in the nearly two months since McClatchy had published its story, no U.S. agency has contacted the newspaper company about the article or has asked any questions about the origins of the story.

“Multiple sources inside and outside of the Yemeni government confirmed our reporting and not one of them told us not to publish the facts,” Asher said. Gregory Johnsen, a Yemen expert and the author of “The Last Refuge,” a book on al Qaida in Yemen, said that he had been told before the McClatchy report that Zawahiri and Wuhayshi were the two men who’d been monitored and that many people in Yemen knew the details of the communication. Johnsen had made a similar statement to McClatchy in early August.

“The idea that the identities of Wuhayshi and Zawahiri are responsible for the difficulties the U.S. is having in tracking al Qaida and AQAP is laughable,” Johnsen said Monday, referring to the Yemen al Qaida affiliate by its initials. “The U.S. publicly closed 19 embassies, the participation of Wuhayshi and Zawahiri was well known in Yemen. I was told about it prior to McClatchy publishing it. And once the leaks start from the U.S. government they can be hard to stop or to control.”

That last sentence is particularly damaging. The anonymous officials quoted in the several articles dealing with the "terrorist chatter" were pushing a narrative of their own -- one that portrayed the US intelligence network as heroes combating terrorism using its extensive surveillance toolkit. The faux-leakage seemed to be ordained by the administration itself, which issued no statements at the time decrying the spilling of confidential information. What looked at the time to be a blatant attempt to spin the story in the NSA's favor now looks undeniably like a diversionary tactic that backfired badly, possibly compromising a valuable intercept.

But even this new concern may be nothing but spin, or an attempt to lull NSA targets into a false sense of security. As McClatchy notes, much of the communications loss occurred well before the August leaks.

Johnsen and other observers of Yemen said they doubted that the reports had anything to do with a drop-off in terrorists “chatter.” They said the decline in al Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula’s use of electronic communication pre-dated the August embassy plot, with some tying it to increased pressure on the group--including a sustained uptick in the frequency of drone strikes on Al Qaida targets dating back to the end of 2011…

Yemeni journalists also have noticed that once-regular email statements from the group have dried up since mid-2012 and attributed the silence to a Yemeni military offensive against AQAP-affiliated militants in the southern Abyan province.

There's no indication the administration is mounting an investigation into these "leaks," which would indicate there was some approval at high levels to allow this narrative to be deployed. If the NSA has truly lost a valuable intercept, it really has no one to blame but the White House.. and itself.

from the what's-a-little-spying-among-friends dept

When the news of the US spying on EU embassies and various other official buildings came out over the weekend, we noted that this really wasn't that surprising, as it appeared to be very typical espionage -- the kind that has happened for decades, if not centuries. Still, it's not entirely clear that President Obama's response to this controversy is particularly tactful. He basically uses the "hey, come on guys, we're all doing this to each other, right?" excuse:

"We should stipulate that every intelligence service – not just ours, but every European intelligence service, every Asian intelligence service, wherever there's an intelligence service … here's one thing that they're going to be doing: they're going to be trying to understand the world better and what's going on in world capitals," he told a press conference during a long-scheduled trip Tanzania. "If that weren't the case, then there'd be no use for an intelligence service."

"And I guarantee you that in European capitals, there are people who are interested in, if not what I had for breakfast, at least what my talking points might be should I end up meeting with their leaders. That's how intelligence services operate," Obama added.

While I still think that this particular revelation is hardly that surprising, and agree that it's almost certain that various European countries are doing the same sort of thing to the US, I do wonder if that's the most tactful response to the growing controversy. Still, I do wonder if the focus on this will take away from the much larger issue of using intelligence services not to spy on other governments, but on the public via mass dragnet collections of information.